[What happened to this one little girl, whose crumpled body was found in a blood-smeared dress in January, is now the biggest news in India. It taps straight into some of the most stubborn issues this country faces in the abuse of women and girls and the deep divisions between Hindus and Muslims.]
By
Jeffrey Gettleman
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A
protest on Friday in Hyderabad, India, over the rape and murder of a 8-year-old
girl.
Her
body was found in January, but the case roared back into life this week after
an
attempt
to physically block police officers from filing charges.
Credit
Mahesh Kumar A./Associated Press
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NEW
DELHI — The rape and killing
of an 8-year-old girl is provoking major political fallout for India’s
government, with an explosion of outrage reminiscent of the reaction several
years ago after a young woman was brutally raped on a bus and later died of her
injuries.
In the past few days, as protests erupted
across the country, two politicians from the governing party have resigned, the
Supreme Court has stepped in and opposition leaders have tried to push India’s
prime minister, Narendra Modi, into a corner.
Mr. Modi issued brief remarks on Friday about
the rape case and another recent one, but only after opposition leaders spoke
out, criticizing his silence. His statement that the country was ashamed about
the rapes and that “our daughters will definitely get justice” did not seem to
douse the growing anger.
What happened to this one little girl, whose
crumpled body was found in a blood-smeared dress in January, is now the biggest
news in India. It taps straight into some of the most stubborn issues this
country faces in the abuse of women and girls and the deep divisions between
Hindus and Muslims.
The girl came from a nomadic Muslim community
in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. The police say a group of Hindu men
lured her into a forest, kidnapped her, drugged her, locked her in a Hindu
temple, gang-raped her and then strangled her.
According to investigators, the culprits
confessed after being arrested and said that they had targeted the young girl
as part of a plot to terrorize her nomadic community and drive them away.
As more sickening details have emerged, the
horror has grown. Some of India’s biggest film stars have staged a social media
campaign to share their disgust. Many Indians say the revulsion they feel — and
their anger at their government — is similar to that after the 2012 rape of the
young woman on the bus in New Delhi, the capital, when all of India paused for
a moment.
“A rape is a rape. This one may be even
worse,” said Deepa Narayan, a social scientist who recently published a book on
how women are treated in India. “The bus rape was a bunch of drunk men looking
for a good time who lost all control. This was a very deliberately planned-out
crime, using the rape of a little girl over days as a political weapon.”
In January, when the crime occurred, the
girl’s death barely registered beyond local news reports.
But the case roared back to life this week
after a mob of lawyers surrounded a courthouse and tried to block police
officers from filing charges (the police eventually filed the charge sheet at a
judge’s house). Some of the lawyers were aligned with Mr. Modi’s nationalist
party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, known as the B.J.P.
Two B.J.P. ministers in the Jammu and Kashmir
state government who had participated in the protests resigned on Friday under
widespread criticism, facing accusations of obstructing justice and fanning
religious divisions.
One of the ministers, Choudhary Lal Singh,
denied that he had quit under pressure from the B.J.P. “I did it because there
was pressure from the country,” he said.
India’s ruling party seems to have failed to
learn the painful political lessons from the 2012 rape. At the time, the Indian
National Congress, now the leading opposition party, was in power, and it was
severely criticized for its slow and tone-deaf reaction.
Those same criticisms are now being leveled
against Mr. Modi and his party.
The Supreme Court has issued an order to the
lawyers involved in the protests to explain why they physically blocked police
officials from entering the courthouse. The lawyers have said they were stirred
to action by a right-wing Hindu group that is pushing for the investigation to
be taken out of the hands of the state police, which they say has a pro-Muslim
bias, and given to a national crime bureau they say is more neutral.
This latest rape case is rapidly becoming
another low point between India’s Hindus and Muslims; politicians have often
stirred the two communities against each other, with fatal consequences. The
victim was Muslim, all eight men arrested were Hindus and some of the
investigators are Muslim. On the other side of the gulf, Muslims generally
distrust the governing party and its Hindu nationalist philosophy.
And this is not the only big rape case the
governing party has to deal with right now.
A powerful governing-party lawmaker in the
Uttar Pradesh State Assembly has been accused of raping a teenage girl and then
conspiring with his brother to help kill the girl’s father after the family
complained.
Opposition leaders have turned the
coincidence of these two cases to their advantage, holding a midnight vigil and
accusing the governing party of protecting rapists and killers. But they might
not have had the chance, analysts said, had Mr. Modi showed a little more
concern, a little earlier.
“Mr. Modi definitely spoke too late,” said
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, vice chancellor of Ashoka University.
Ms. Narayan, the author, agreed. “Modi is
always a slow reactor,” she said. “He waits for an issue to go away and when it
doesn’t and he’s in a corner, he speaks up and makes platitudes.”
She added: “I think the B.J.P. will suffer
from this. They will pay a price for the impunity they’ve unleashed by not
treating crimes as crimes but by politicizing them.”
Suhasini Raj contributed from Jaipur, and
Sameer Yasir from Srinagar, Kashmir.